Right royal rhinestones

How are you all celebrating the Queen’s birthday*? If you’re at a loss as to what to do with a whole day of freedom, here’s a right royal(ish) project to inspire some DIY. What’s so regal about it? Not much, actually, but these sparkly rhinestoney earrings (from an op shop, naturally) kind of remind me of tiaras… and tiaras are worn by royalty… so there’s your tenuous link.

Here’s what the earrings looked like before:

I know, I know… there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re pretty and SHINY and I could just wear them exactly as they are. But if you think I would, you obviously haven’t been paying attention because 1. I can’t leave stuff alone and 2. I don’t wear small earrings!

So here’s what I did. The earrings kind of look like flowers, so I wanted to add some “leaves” to them – which would also serve to alter their overall shape into a more contemporary ear “cuff” look. I thought about what I could use as the leaves – leather? cardboard? metal? bits of margarine container? – and then remembered some very stiff interfacing I had used IN HIGH SCHOOL (ie more than 20 years ago) which turned out to be perfect. I cut out some leafy shapes from the interfacing…

…then painted them green on both sides using normal paint (but I suppose you could use fabric paint or nail polish, depending on the effect you want).

I then used superglue to stick the leaves together (yes, I could have just cut out this shape to start with instead of glueing the two pieces together, but I wasn’t sure what angle I wanted the leaves to sit at against the earrings, so had to manipulate the pieces around a bit). Can you tell what movie I was watching while doing this (yes, I’m that person who’s home watching kids’ movies on a Saturday night…)?

By itself, the green paint contrasted a bit too much with the sparkle of the earrings, so I painted glittery nail polish over the leaves too. And then I just had to work out how I wanted them to sit against my ears – cue a fair bit of fiddling in front of the mirror.

Once I was happy with the angle of the leaves, I glued them to the backs of the earrings.

Yes, they’re clip-ons because I don’t have my ears pierced. If you were using earrings with posts you’d probably be best to poke the post through the leaves – you might not even have to use superglue if you have earring backs that are fairly firm and can hold the leaves in place. Originally I was intending the leaves to be removable, but couldn’t work out how to achieve that. Anyway, I’m fairly happy with how they turned out!

Kind of princessy, don’t you think?

Of course there’s a lot of other shapes you could add if you want to try something like this – it kind of depends on the shape of the “base” earrings and whether they’re posts or clip-ons. And you could glue on all kinds of different materials – as I suggested before, leather would be good (as long as it’s thin) but you could use tulle or lace for a pretty effect or try hessian, maybe even stiffened with nail polish (clear? coloured? with glitter? lots of choices!) or a cluster of really big sequins. Check out some of my other ideas by searching “earrings” in the “looking for something?” field at the bottom of the page! And (shameless self promotion ahead) – if you can’t be bothered making your own ear cuffs, you can always find some designed by yours truly here!

*For my non-Australian readers**, today’s a public holiday in Victoria.

**I’ve got a bit obsessed with my blog statistics recently and noticed that last week I had a lot (well, for me a lot!) of visitors from the US and for some reason Estonia and Sweden – not sure why? If you’re a first time reader I’d love you to comment and let me know how you found me!